Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography

Mary Todd Lincoln had a rough life. From the early death of her mother to the treatment she recieved from her stepmother, to her husband's assissination and was committed to an asylum by her own son. Reading the biography it was hard not to feel sorry for her. I knew naturally (as everyone) about her husband's assissination but I was surprised about how hard the rest of her life was. Her son Robert committed and she had to fight to get out of the asylum. Her early years Mary spent having to put up with a stepmother who wanted her husband's first set of children completely forgotten. Poor girl.

Jean Baker's biography of Mary Todd Lincoln is a well written work on an individual whose life was at once extraordinarily blessed and tragically cursed. Born in Lexington to an upper middle class family with a long history in Kentucky, Mary was given both the traditional lifestyle of the young southern belle and the unusual opportunity of an education. During a time when most women of her social class were almost invisible to the public world, Mary was better educated, more outgoing, more inclined to express a personal opinion, and more ambitious than others of her set. To some extent these are the reasons she reached the White House. They are also responsible for some of her social problems after leaving Washington. In fact, except for the early loss of her husband and children--a common tragedy for many women of the time--most of Mary Lincoln's troubles were the outcome of her attitudes toward others and her extraordinary self absorption. Even the loss of close family members merely presented an opportunity for her to assume the role of heroine in her own tragic drama, and she carried her mourning to extremes rather than give up center stage. Focus became not the sad death of young men at the very beginning of their lives or of a national loss of a great leader, but Mary Todd Lincoln's grief. When others refused to make her the center of their attention indefinitely, she apparently felt they were unreasonable, and her outbursts alienated many who might have helped her far more and more readily than they ultimately did. To say that she was a woman with great psychological and situation problems is an understatement.Professor Baker tends to put a feminist spin on the events of Mary Lincoln's life, seeing her as a victim of the misogynistic, paternalistic environment of her times and, as a woman ahead of her time, a prime target for male backlash. To some extent this may be--probably is--true, but not entirely. Certainly there were as many, if not probably more, women who disliked her, some of them formerly close friends. In defense of the men and women of the mid nineteenth century, the behavioral expectations of the day simply were what they were and putting their social mores on trial at this late date is not only unjust, it's pointless. Even in our own society, which tolerates a far greater variance in behavior and where rapid communication allows us to share what's new more globally, there are still behaviors that raise eyebrows. Like the society of Mary's day, we don't like to have our sense of what's "right" offended. To see this more personally, one has merely to cross cultural lines, from say western to middle easter for instance, to feel the high dudgeon that the people of Mary's environment may have felt over her breeches of expected behavior. One of the figures in the story, most often vilified as the Bad Son, is Robert Lincoln. I had heard before the story of his consigning his mother to a sanitarium. The book

Not your typical summer fare, this book is serious and sweeping. It's a staggering chronicle of loss, beginning with the death of Mary's mother when she was a girl, through the deaths of her sons, the murder of her husband, the loss of her place in society, and the virtual loss of her oldest son and her only grandchild. The toll these tragedies took on Mary was mighty, but understandable. And Dr. Baker makes this sad saga imminently readable. I am haunted by a statement about the young Mary -- she did the wrong things well. Her unique strengths and talents were unfashionable for the time, and this cost her dearly.

Mary Todd Lincoln is commonly dismissed as the "crazy" First Lady, un unpleasant burden on an outstanding president already burdened by a country at war with itself. I admit that I held this conception before reading Baker's biography of Mary Todd Lincoln. Baker, however, successfully convinced me that Mary was simply misunderstood, victimized by the press of the day, and manipulated mercilessly by her oldest son, Robert, following Lincoln's assassination. Though Baker has little to work with concerning details of Mary's early life in Kentucky and then Springfield, she makes up for it with fascinating accounts of what life was like for women of Mary's station in the early- to mid-1800s. Baker also offers a fascinating portrait of the much-maligned Mary who fled later in life to Europe and a quieter life. We see Mary's faults, but we also see the abuse she suffered in public as a result of those faults being exaggerated by her enemies. Ultimately, Baker offers an account of the perils of being a confident, outspoken woman in the 19th century.

While Jean H. Baker has done meticulous research and her work is liberally footnoted, reading between the lines one finds a sympathetic account of one woman by another. Mary Todd Lincoln was one of the most misunderstood and reviled women of her day, for behavior that today we might understand as acting out depression, grief, anxiety and fear. I couldn't help but also feel a connection to this woman trying to survive in a repressive, male-centered society. So much has been written that portrays her husband as a saint and her as a shrew, that it's refreshing to read a more balanced view that is probably much closer to the way it really was. Mary Todd Lincoln deserves another look, both as a brave first lady enduring unimaginable tragedy and as a woman who was perhaps better suited to a different time in history.